Blogging | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Cheap ways to master the universe

These are some ways that I am planning to master the universe. You can steal, borrow, appropriate and copy any that you see fit. A couple things seem to be in my future:

a book – most probably an ebook – coming soon – gonna read more about some ideas for marketing it here from Seth Godin’s “Ideavirus” (a free book that you can buy – I might try this myself – you should too)
a domain name – toying with a “.me” as the suffix and have a pretty good idea what it will be called. I will get it from godaddy.com as they seem to have worked well in the past for domain name forwarding.¹
logging, creating, showcasing more of my artistry – I am good. I have good ideas. I actually was allowed into OCAD for 5 years because they thought so too. I will probably do that starting right here on the site with some of the logos and designs I have made with hopefully a lot more to come
working through education towards working anywhere, any time, and most probably about any thing – I don’t want to be limited by any of the aforementioned factors: place, time, confines of job description, so I am plotting ways to do this – one way is hopefully through developing online resources
(slick) business cards – gotta have em – plus you can feel cool giving them out – ooh, and designing them.

¹ Since writing this post I have created this blog through WordPress.com. It allows you to buy and link a domain name really easily to your site. The drawbacks are that you do not have complete control over the look and addition of plug-ins or widgets. The advantages are that you will probably get higher hits to your blog sooner, it is all-in-one, which means it is easier, and you have support from WordPress.com. This is something I did not find with Orgfree.com. Too bad.

When to Publish a blog

14 Apr

Most obviously, or maybe not, the best time to add posts would seem: before your readers tend to go to your blog.

This may mean you are adding blogs at 6:00am to catch the morning crowd.

However, there may be other considerations as well. For example, where is your readership from? Are they mostly from North America? If so, you might need to reconsider timing.

What about the best day to blog? If this is a concern, you might need to watch traffic trends to your blog. You might try Woopra or Google Analytics.

If you get lots of traffic, and a steady readership then you need to maintain consistency. People will keep coming back if you have something to say and if they know what to expect. However, if you are doing things in big bursts (for example, 5-20 blogs at a time) and then none for a while, people might forget about you and let you dwindle in the dust.

Another thing to consider is how to get your blog out there. If you haven’t already, add a “Follow this”, “Tweet this”, “Like” or some other social network button to allow people to share with others. You want people talking about your blog and hopefully even commenting on the posts.

Keep it up. Keep it steady. Make it interesting and relevant.

A New World Order: Short. Thoughts.

11 Apr

Two friends of mine have iterated the sentiment that ‘long copy’ might be a thing of the past. We are writing for new readers: SMSers & smart phone (both 420 characters), tablet, and netbook readers, Twitter (140 characters), Google meta-tags with their overview of websites (233 characters), Facebook status updates (changed from 160 to 420 characters), MSN updates 128 characters) and more. We are limited with characters. Therefore, we need to

Get to the point!

My friend, Christina Arenth, writes, “My favorite history writing professor always told us that if we couldn’t say it in two pages, we didn’t have any idea what were talking about”.

Another friend, Aloha Lavina, who used to be a journalist and now writes for a blog, was talking to me the other day and mentioned that Newspapers need to write in shorter format. She said, people don’t want to read long jargon anymore. Today is the day of single sentence paragraphs.

Short. Succinct. Just like this article.

WordPress blog from iPad2

09 Apr

I am writing this blog from my iPad2. I love it, but the App has it’s limits. In order for you to write your own blog:

Download the WordPress App from the AppStore
Go to your blog online. (not from the WordPress App)
Log in
Go to: “Settings” –> “Writing” –> “Remote Publishing”
Check “Enable the Atom Publishing Protocol”
Check “Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols”
Save changes
Log in to the WordPress App
Add or edit “Posts”, “Pages” and “Comments”.

I tried to add pics through the iPad2. First, I tried the Free Adobe Photoshop Express App. Surprisingly, it didn’t open PSD files. Huh?

My next step was to look at the PSD viewer from Adobe, but it seems just like the name implies… a viewer!

I downloaded Layersforipad for $5.99, hoping it would allow me to open and edit PSD files. I can create PSD files, but I cannot open my saved files from Dropbox.

I have a red border, that you see around every image in my blog, that I want to continue on the images. In order to do this I have to:

Download an image with the border (This is not the PSD file, which would be ideal)
Open the file in “Layersforipad”
Painstakingly, delete the inner image, but not the border, pixel by pixel. (This took about an hour or more)
Prepare the image I want to use with “moreBeaute2″ to soften and correct, and “PS Express” to crop
Insert the photo layer in “Layersforipad”
Save to photos
Resize the image in the “Resize photos” app
Upload the image through the WordPress app, which always places the image at the bottom of the post (it is necessary to copy and paste the HTML code if I want to move the image

Note about writing blogs through the WordPress App: There is no WYSIWYG editor. Therefore it is useful, almost crucial that you can edit HTML in order to have proper formatting.